Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Then in terms of fixed access, obviously, the comparables are pretty tough now because we had substantial growth in that business, both in ’21 and ’22. When we get into ’24, we do expect to start getting support from government funded programs, especially the BEAD program in the US, the 42 billion high-speed Internet grant program, where we estimate that our accessible market is about 10% of that. We have – since the announcement in July, where we – where we announced that we would be starting manufacturing that would be in compliance with the Buy America requirements. We have had significant traction from several service providers, including Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers that will be making investments and getting funding from the BEAD initiative.

So this will start coming gradually during 2024. In general, when we talk about the demand for Network Infrastructure there is here and there interesting evidence that hopefully, we would now be in through the low point in terms of demand in Q3, in terms of new orders, and we would expect that gradually, the market will start recovering. But again, it is too early to call it a broad-based recovery, but we are seeing signs here and there. So that’s why we definitely continue to believe in the potential of Network Infrastructure.

Richard Kramer: Thank you. And maybe a quick one for Marco – a quick follow-up from Marco, just so we can understand it, does the rise of reaching 10% of enterprise sales within the mix, does that have a near term dilutive or positive impact on margins, given you obviously are expanding your product portfolio there and you need to do your sort of go-to-market model, but at the same time, enterprise historically has had very healthy margins.

Marco Wiren: Yeah. Thank you for the question. We haven’t specified margin in enterprise side. But as we said that we believe in this sector very heavily and our ambitions is to grow in this sector, and this is one of our strategic pillars as well at the group level that we believe that this will create new opportunities, just like Pekka mentioned already in Network Infrastructure side. In IP side, we have increasingly introducing new offerings to our customers in the webscaler side, where we are still quite small. And this gives – beyond the more normal market development this gives the new opportunities for growth in AI as well.

David Mulholland: Thank you, Richard.

Richard Kramer: Thanks very much.

David Mulholland: We’ll take our next question from Andrew Gardiner from Citi. Andrew, please go ahead.

Andrew Gardiner: Thank you, David. Good morning all. I just wanted to come back to the seasonality you’re calling out in the fourth quarter. I mean, Marco you described normal seasonality, I think, in particular, with reference to Mobile Networks and Network Infrastructure, so low to mid-20% sequential. But at the same time, you’re also telling us that India is off the peak and volumes are coming down. So that is a headwind or a loss being equal. And I think Pekka you mentioned as well that there’s still some impact from the inventory cycle in the fourth quarter. So what would be offsetting those two headwinds to get you to a more normal level of seasonality in the in the fourth quarter?

Marco Wiren: Yeah. As I said, we see different areas in different customers that their plans are and we see potential increase in quarter four, and this is how we have based our forecast as well. And we’ve seen when we gave the quarter two report as well that the second half would be more skewed towards the quarter four and quarter three would be a lower one. And this is exactly how we’ve seen the development so far. So this is where we have based our assumptions in our forecast for quarter four as well.

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